Time & Perspective Quote by Jacques Rivette

Rivette’s praise lands like a provocation: the “craziest film in the history of cinema” isn’t a ranking so much as a dare to take confusion seriously. Coming from a director who spent his career stretching narrative until it frayed, the line reads as a sly defense of cinema that refuses to behave. He’s not embarrassed by not “getting it”; he’s insisting that being unmoored can be the point.

The repetition - “I have no idea... I have no idea...” - is doing rhetorical work. It performs a kind of delighted surrender, the critic’s ego (or the auteur’s) stepping aside to admit the film’s assault on ordinary comprehension. That’s also a jab at the tidy, prestige model of “meaning”: if the only valid response is interpretation, then this movie has failed. Rivette argues the opposite. The value is visceral, not diagrammable.

Context sharpens the claim. Rivette is a New Wave intellectual with an allergy to conventional plotting; “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (the likely target) was famously booed at Cannes and dismissed as incoherent or indulgent. Rivette flips that reception: what others call mess, he calls liberation. “Floating six feet above the ground” isn’t mere hyperbole; it’s the afterimage of cinema as an altered state, where affect outruns explanation. The subtext is generous but combative: let the film overwhelm you, and stop pretending control is the highest form of taste.